thanks hplus for your reply.

im kind of getting ahead of myself here, but... what kind of system specs do you recommend for a server? im guessing that it doesn't have to be a top of the line computer? my game is going to be a persistant online RPG, however not a MMORPG. i am more realistic then that and i don't expect to ever have a game of that quality myself, or, more realistically, dont expect that many users to be playing. my goal is to support 30 people online at once with the server running on my cable connection. so far the bandwith im using is very low, however obviously this will change as i add things. the server will be built into one program , and the machine will also host the SQL database.

anyway, what kind of CPU specs do you recommend? is CPU speed really an issue at all? im thinking memory is more important then CPU, however like i said my goal is to support 30 players, and caching 30 players shouldn't require much memory. would investing in dual CPU's be worth it at all ?

btw, out of curiosity and if you don't mind, what game are you working with right now ? just ignore this if you don't want to answer [smile].

thanks again.

Quote:
is CPU speed really an issue at all?

That depends on the game. You can either implement the server, then measure it under load, and calculate CPU needs that way. Or you can decide on a CPU right now, and make sure that you measure your server as you develop, so you don't go over the determined budget.

I'd say that, for a simple RPG with 30 players, anything Pentium III/500 or newer is likely to do fine, assuming you don't do actual step-based physical simulation on the server, but rather cast rays through some optimized representation of walls once in a while (say, every second or so).

Currently, I'm working on technology planned to be used by the military to train and refresh remote and disparate troops together. That project has the catchy name "AW-VTT" -- I'm sure you've heard of it ;-)

Writing remote admin into your server would be very cool, although writing a whole webserver into your app might be a bit of overkill. It would probably be much easier to write your own little network admin app - as your game is already multipler adding a special logon for admin shouldn't be too dificult and would be extremely handy. It would also mean you could run your admin app on a different OS than your server :P

Although to be honest I'd just recomment printing to the console till your game is at least mostly working. Its simple and easy and if you print to stderr you "should" get all the messages printed (if you print to stdout and your server die the last few messages may be lost). The console maybe slow but if your only printing out some admin lines every now and then it shouldn't be a problem. If you print out data every game loop then it'll chugg like crazy - but I unless your debugging something you probably shouldn't be printing out that much stuff anyway.

I also second the log point - they will save you hours and much sanity if use well :D

[Edited by - kaysik on November 11, 2004 11:28:44 PM]